cause. It is now called Na-tal, with the emphasis sharp on the last syllable. I remember when we simply translated the Latin word into plain English and called the place Port Natal in the ordinary way,—as may be remembered by the following stanza from Tom Hood's "Miss Kelmansegg":—
Into this world we come like ships,
Launched from the docks and stocks and slips,
For future fair or fatal.
And one little craft is cast away
On its very first trip to Babbicombe Bay,
While another rides safe at Port Natal.
After that no more was known of the coast for more than a hundred and fifty years. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the Dutch seem to have had a settlement there,—not the Dutch coming overland as they did afterwards, but the Dutch trading along the coast. It did not, however, come to much, and we hear no more of the country till 1823,—only fifty-five years ago,—when an English officer of the name of Farewell, with a few of his countrymen, settled himself on the land where the town of D'Urban now stands. At that time King Chaka of the Zulus, of whom I shall speak in a following chapter, had well-nigh exterminated the natives of the coast, so that there was no one to oppose Mr. Farewell and his companions. There they remained, with more or less of trouble from Chaka's successor and from invading Zulus, till 1835, when the British of the Cape Colony took so much notice of the place as to call the settlement Durban, after Sir Benjamin D'Urban, its then Governor.
Then began the real history of Natal which like so many
